i don't know, my approach to street tends to be to shoot at f/8, with manual prefocus..
i mean, it's certainly challenging to even shoot people at f/1.8 or shallow dof, with the benefit of greater isolation, but to really "arrange" the street into some semblance of a composition, be it with light, or moment, or anything, even color.. somehow shallow dof seems like a wee bit of cheating to me..
in which case.. any lens would really do, so long as the performance is up to par at f/8.. which is generally no problem for most.
granted, most of the street photographers in the past that are popularised today were generally shooting with such a style because they had no other choice.. but if they could produce timeless results..?
you can also end up concentrating on netting the moment as well, instead of capturing expressions. maybe it's just me, i tend to have very.. rigid approaches to certain genres of photography.